Ahh, what a blessed curse...
The system cannot find the path specified.
Better yet...
Unable to create the file 'New Text Document.txt'
The system cannot find the file specified.
These are the errors I get while trying to extract SQL Reporting Services from the Microsoft licensing download site. I imagine not too many people out there (compared to the community size) will run into this problem, but I wanted to post on it anyway.
More precisely, I am extracting the “SW CD SQL Svr Developer Edtn 2000 English MultiLang RptSr MLF.exe” file - if that isn't a mouthful, I don't know what is - and am getting the first error message (a LOT of times, too - 400+). The first time, I figured it wasn't a big deal (I didn't count them), so I just let it go. Obviously, it was.
By this time, I renamed the default directory name to something that was easier to read - “SQL Rptg Svcs” (the name of the CD I burned). So, I extracted the files into the renamed directory and I recieved the first error only once. While this was an improvement over the first extraction, I decided to investigate. I checked out the location and noticed the file was not put into the directory. I tried to extract again, but to no avail. Then, I tried to create a text file in that directory (to paste the error message from the extractor for more detail) and I received the second error.
Hmmm... I think I've stumbled onto something. I renamed the horrendously long directory that was created and voila - the extraction worked. I want to say that the directory and file names together (of the errors) ranged from 223-247 characters in length. I remember hearing about a max length of 255, but I thought that was just for the actual file name, not the directory, too. Oh well.
Lesson Learned: If you're extracting large CDs of information with a lot of directories, do so at a root, or close-to-root directory.